Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Small Bowel Segmentation using Disentangled Representation

Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2021 Sep-Oct:12903:282-292. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-87199-4_27. Epub 2021 Sep 21.

Abstract

We present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for small bowel segmentation based on feature disentanglement. To make the domain adaptation more controllable, we disentangle intensity and non-intensity features within a unique two-stream auto-encoding architecture, and selectively adapt the non-intensity features that are believed to be more transferable across domains. The segmentation prediction is performed by aggregating the disentangled features. We evaluated our method using intravenous contrast-enhanced abdominal CT scans with and without oral contrast, which are used as source and target domains, respectively. The proposed method showed clear improvements in terms of three different metrics compared to other domain adaptation methods that are without the feature disentanglement. The method brings small bowel segmentation closer to clinical application.

Keywords: Abdominal computed tomography; Feature disentanglement; Small bowel segmentation; Unsupervised domain adaptation.